Articles

Chad Chelius, author of Adobe InDesign CC Learn by Video (2015 release), talks about his favorite features in the latest release of Adobe InDesign, including paragraph shading, converting a table cell to a graphic cell, and Creative Cloud libraries.

In this excerpt from Adobe InDesign CC Classroom in a Book (2015 release), you'll learn how to work with layers, create and edit text frames and graphics frames, import graphics into graphics frames, import multiple graphics into a grid of frames, crop, move, and scale graphics, adjust the space between frames, add captions to graphics frames, place and link graphics frames, change the shape of frames, wrap text around an object, create complex frame shapes, convert frame shapes to other shapes, modify and align objects, select and modify multiple objects, and create a QR code.

Blogs

Each month we will select one User Group that has been exceptional in their communication with meeting updates, giveaway requests and book reviews and ask them to share some insights and tips with us. This week, we turn the spotlight on New York InDesign User Group as our UG of the Month!

When Adobe® InDesign® CS3 was released a few years back, included
among its new features was an enhanced set of special effects. If you haven’t
had a chance to explore these special effects and add them to your bag of
InDesign tricks, you owe it to yourself to take a look. This tip will focus on
using the Bevel And Emboss effect to create three-dimensional typographic
elements, but there are eight other effects—each with its own set of
controls—that you can apply to text, frames, pictures … pretty much anything.
Although many of these effects are available in Photoshop and Illustrator, the
option to apply them to InDesign objects can save time and reduce
file-management overhead.

Sometimes when laying out an Adobe® InDesign® page, you may want to
remove the background of an imported image—perhaps so you can wrap text around
a shape as in Figure 1. Creating a clipping path in Photoshop is often the best
solution because its selection tools make it easy to isolate and remove even
complex backgrounds. However, because the graphic element (the dancing pair) in
Figure 1 is much darker than the background (the surrounding white area), you
can easily remove the background using the Clipping Path feature in InDesign.
In addition to removing white and light backgrounds, you can also use the
Clipping Path feature to remove black backgrounds and backgrounds that are
significantly darker than the graphic element they surround.

Since the dawn of page layout software in the mid-1980s,
layout artists have been forced to create two text frames for stories that span
multiple columns: a one-column text frame that spans multiple columns for the
headline and a multicolumn text frame for the body text. Adobe® InDesign® CS5 makes it
a whole lot easier to lay out pages with multicolumn stories by providing the
option to extend paragraphs across the gutters of multicolumn text frames. It’s
a killer feature with an intuitive UI that will save many users considerable
time.